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When Old Things Turn Into New Again

WHILE combining gasoline and electric motors in a car seems like a miracle of automotive wizardry of the 21st century, the origins of hybrid technology actually date to the end of the 19th. In the intervening years the chapters of hybrid history have roared to life, only to fall quickly silent — much like the gasoline engines in hybrids today. More than once the technology has been championed as a breakthrough, only to be cast aside when a more convenient alternative emerges. Then the idea is “discovered” again.

The Paris Exposition of 1900 featured the Lohner-Porsche Elektromobil, which would later become one of the first hybrid cars. It was designed two years earlier by a 23-year-old engineer, unknown at the time, named Ferdinand Porsche. Exposition records show that Porsche’s vehicle could travel 38 miles solely on electricity.

How it came about was this: Jacob Lohner, a coach builder in Vienna in the late 1800s, was interested in the development of motorcars that incorporated coaches of the period. He asked the young Porsche, a graduate of the Vienna Technical College, to build a silent electric carriage. The gas-powered vehicles of the era were noisy, smelly, shaky and difficult to start.

Porsche integrated battery-powered electric motors directly into the front-wheel hubs, producing one of the first front-wheel-drive cars. He later added an internal combustion gasoline engine to drive a generator, which charged the batteries. The Lohner-Porsche vehicle could reach a maximum speed of only about 35 miles an hour, but the proto-hybrid was born.

Porsche is better known today as the designer of the Volkswagen and for the famed sports car company brought to prominence by his son.

Hybrids virtually disappeared for the next 60 years, a period which brought the growth of the modern automobile industry, a rapidly expanding national highway system in the United States and lots of cheap gasoline. Backyard tinkerers and dreamers cobbled together hybrids, yet no project enjoyed enough drive to take them to market.

The first concerns about auto emissions restored interest in electric vehicles. C. Russell Feldman, a founder of Motorola, took notice in 1962 of the rising concern over automobile pollution and explored the market possibilities for electric cars. Mr. Feldman contacted Victor Wouk, an electrical engineer and entrepreneur, who drove Mr. Feldman’s test electric vehicles, took measurements and reported that the batteries did not have the energy required to produce enough speed or range.

Throughout the 60s, Dr. Wouk pondered the problem and reached an ingenious solution: combine the low-emissions benefits of an electric car with the power of a gasoline engine to produce a hybrid vehicle. Dr. Wouk and his colleague, Charles L. Rosen, formed a new company, Petro-Electric Motors, to develop their hybrid car idea and pitch it to the Environmental Protection Agency, which had announced a program to encourage development of “clean cars.”

The inventors chose a Buick Skylark, which had ample room under the hood, for their prototype. The team used the garage at Dr. Rosen’s home in Teaneck, N.J., as the workshop. A Wankel rotary gasoline engine and eight lead-acid batteries were shoehorned under the Skylark’s hood. Predating computer controls, a mechanical system blended the drive power from the batteries and gasoline engine. A welding shop melded the crazy quilt of parts and pieces into a rough prototype that shook and rattled at highway speeds.

Dr. Wouk and Dr. Rosen tinkered and tested for the next two years. If only they could get a rough hybrid prototype built and tested, they reasoned, the government or an automaker would surely invest millions to mass-produce the hybrid.

After the E.P.A. threatened to drop the entire program, Dr. Wouk pleaded with the agency to let the project proceed. In 1974, the agency tested the hybrid over three months, and it passed standards for more development. But a month later, the E.P.A. sent a report citing many reasons the hybrid would not go into the next phase of support — mostly because of the testing equipment’s inability to evaluate vehicles using multiple power sources.

After two years of trying to get the E.P.A. to overturn its rejection, or to get the auto industry to pay attention to the hybrid’s abilities, Petro-Electric Motors ran out of money. Once again, hybrid history went silent.

The 1980s and ’90s brought the sport-utility vehicle and several industry research projects, notably the Clinton administration’s billion-dollar Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, which resulted in hybrid prototypes. But none made it past the concept phase.

Then in 1994, nearly a century after Porsche’s hybrid arrived on the scene, Akihiro Wada, executive vice president of Toyota, posed a challenge before a special team of company engineers: build a car with double the fuel efficiency of contemporary vehicles. Three years later, Toyota introduced the Prius in Japan as the world’s first mass-produced gas-electric car.

Today, the Prius competes with conventional sedans as a top seller in the United States, and nearly every major carmaker in the world has either introduced hybrids or is struggling to create the technologies to make cars more efficient.

The next big new idea is actually an old idea: the plug-in hybrid, which is expected to arrive sometime in the next 5 to 10 years. Victor Wouk saw this clearly in 1974, when he was quoted in The New York Times as saying an all-electric car “could solve the housewife’s fuel problems.”

“She could drive 10 miles to the supermarket just on the batteries,” he said, “and when she got home, plug into an outlet in the garage and recharge the batteries for the next day.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on page SPG13 of the National edition with the headline: When Old Things Turn Into New Again. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe